triage your to-do list.
You didn’t notice that your knee was bouncing. Shifting in your seat, you felt it jam into the underside of your desk.
Blargh.
Guess you were bouncing your knee in agitation after all. Wonder if your face knows about the agitation, too – wait, shit.
As if in slow motion, your coffee crests the rim of your mug and makes a break for the keyboard. A quick check confirms that your camera is on but you are, in fact, still muted. You double check one more time anyway before daring a soft “fuck’s sake…” more to yourself than to anyone on the call.
Do you really need to be part of this meeting? Or, at the very least, does this meeting really need to be happening this week? Today? Yet another chat catches your eye while you try, with fervor, to steer the trackpad anywhere close to the “stop video” button. An @ mention, great.
The fingers on your left hand extend toward the napkins from lunch yesterday–or was it last week?– in a desperate effort to foil the keyboard caffeination attempt. As your fingertips brush against the dry supply, your phone rings. Yes, your phone that's on do-not-disturb. The jolt successfully sends the napkins careening to the floor. 8 missed calls – for real? It’s going to have to wait. You need all 30 minutes after this meeting to finish the slides for the next one.
It’s the text that does it.
It’s only Tuesday but three words just toppled your week and probably your weekend. Again. Maybe even next week, too.
“Check your email.”
Does the mythical land of Caught Up actually exist? What about such exotic locales as Ahead?
Yes, both exist.
4 steps and 30 minutes to get caught up.
Before we spend too long daydreaming of galaxies far, far away, let’s clean up the coffee and make a plan to get through the day. What we need right now, in this moment, is a triage system. We need to stop the bleed before we proceed. Then we’ll look at systems to sustain the journey onward to Caught Up and Ahead.
There are so many acronyms out there for what to do and when, where, and how to do it. Things to do, things not to do; who’s right? Which ones should you use, which should you throw out, and which should you use before or after the others?
There is so much fluff to sift through. And in the irony of all ironies, here’s one more acronym. This is also the one that will help you decide when to use the other tricks, tips, and tools you’ve opted to keep in your arsenal.
PIPES.
- Pause & Identify
- Prioritize
- Eliminate
- Start
To clean out the pipes properly, we have to get comfortable with the idea of identifying the MOST important, mission critical thing on your plate. Everything we decide to do will be in service of that.
That's you. You're the pipe cleaner.
1. Pause & Identify.
Need help starting? Me too. Let’s find the leak.
Grab a whiteboard, pen & paper, or a blank word doc. Write down anything and everything that comes to mind as a “to-do” item. Stream of consciousness. Let it flow, get it out. All of it. It doesn’t matter what type of task it is – not yet. Just write it all down.
Bullets work best here. Email? Report? Event? Bills? Appointment? Grocery list? Write it down. Do this until you can think of no more. Seriously. Empty everything you’re trying to hold onto in your brain.
2. Prioritize.
You're not creating a plan yet. You're going to first find and label anything that is mission-critical from your brain dump. The most important of the important.
In this stage, importance is determined by due date. In the event of a tie, the more consequential task takes precedent.
If you have an email to respond to about a project and a client deliverable at work that both fall on the same day, for example, prioritize the client deliverable because the ripple effect of its impact on others is greater. Fear not, the email you need to send will still be accounted for. When identifying these top ranking, mission-critical tasks, you get to pick three items. Mark them with something to signify their importance. I recommend circling them.
Now, move onto labeling the next group of items from the list in order of importance. Choose another identifier; one that you didn’t use for the first group. If you used a circle for Group 1, use a star, an underline, arrows etc… for this group. You get to pick five items for Group 2.
Repeat this selection process one more time for the next batch of tasks by importance. Group 3 gets, you guessed it, another identifying symbol that hasn't been used yet. Pick five items for this group.
Leave the remaining items in the big list for now.
3. Eliminate.
The method we’re using is very similar to the Eisenhower Matrix, with some adjustments. With our established groups of tasks sorted by priority, we’re next going to put them into an action plan. Before crafting that plan, we need to understand what we’re actually up against.
We’re next going to use the questions from the Eisenhower matrix to help sort our tasks within each prioritized group. Three groups, three sets of filtering questions.
While doing this exercise, we’re also leveraging concepts from the PARA organization system and the Time Multiplier funnel.
Start with Priority Group 1. Move through the tasks in the group in order of importance.
First, ask “is this task truly urgent? Can this deadline or due date be moved or adjusted?”. If yes, do it now. Right now. If no, move on to the next question.
Next, consider, “can I delegate this task? Can this task only be accomplished by me?”. If you can delegate it, do so now. Yep, again, right now. If no, move on to the next question.
Lastly, think to yourself, “does this task really need to get done? Will removing this task (from this rung of priority) give me time back to focus on the most important items?”. If the answer is that the task does not actually need to get done right now, send it back to the pile. If it does need to get done, leave it. It’s in the right place. Now, move on to the next group.
Repeat the exercise used for Priority Group 2 and 3.
You’re ready.
4. Start.
You now have three groups: Priority 1. Priority 2, Priority 3. You have a starting point and you know what needs to get done.
Time for action.
In practice, this looks like structuring your day to include a big task, a couple of medium tasks, and a few smaller ones.
The idea is essentially to create progress in intervals, a little at a time. Tackling this to-do list in bite-sized chunks means that you move toward the goal while making sure you have enough in the tank to do it again tomorrow.
The following game plan is a suggestion, as is anything that I share with you. This method works for me – take the parts you like and customize them to work for you. If you don’t know what works for you and what doesn’t, may I suggest starting here until you find something that fits better?
We’re going to borrow Oliver Burkeman’s 3-3-3 method, with some adjustments. Oliver Burkeman is the best-selling author of Four Thousand Weeks to help us work through our process.
The 3-3-3 Action Plan.
three focused hours.
Use this time for only one big task from Priority Group 1.
Identify, carve out, and protect this time. This time has only one objective - your task. Minimize distractions and don’t multitask. No phone, no email, no social media. Activate do-not-disturb, minimize other windows and tabs, maybe even put your phone in another room or out of reach.
Pick a tangible progress marker within your task to aim for. Keep it realistic - you want to set yourself up for wins that you can build on; not tear yourself down with feelings of falling short.
It is ok if you don’t complete if you don’t complete this task! This time is to work on it. It’s about the time spent and not about the outcome. Remember, you want to create repeatable progress without depleting yourself so that you can do it again, and again in the coming days.
three tangible tasks.
This time is to knock out some smaller, yet important tasks from Priority Group 2. Again, keep them achievable.
These are usually urgent tasks that need to get done but that aren’t all that time consuming. Sometimes the size of the to-do list can create a “freeze” element within “fight or flight”. They are the casualties of overwhelm. This section of tasks is to set aside dedicated time for the traditionally, middle-of-the-road items that get procrastinated.
Assign an actual amount of time to each task. It’s ok if the task takes more or less time; by assigning any time at all to it, you’ve created space for the task to get worked on. You’ll be surprised at how little time these items take when you carve out time for them.
This is the space for that project email from earlier. You could also pay that bill or review those presentation materials.
three housekeeping items.
This time is for the smaller items in the “life” pile of Priority Group 3. Use this space to knock out three maintenance-type tasks for your personal and/or professional life.
Examples of these Group 3 tasks might be doing a load of laundry, emptying the dishwasher, taking out the trash, or even spending 15 minutes organizing and planning your calendar for the next day.
You get the idea. The housekeeping bucket ensures that you don’t get overrun while focusing on your big ticket items.
This space is key to keeping fuel in the tank so you can keep showing up.
keys to success.
In my experience, and as discovered through the scientific research of others, energy conservation is a strategy. A good one. And it takes practice.
The time you’ve invested in getting your shit together here will be wasted if you burnout before reaching the end of your to-do list. At which point, you will have to restart without having accomplished what you’d set out to.
I have good and bad news.
Bad news: you’re going to have to repeat this process anyway. A lot. Forever. That’s life.
Good news: It becomes far more manageable and less burdensome with practice. It can even be downright enjoyable.
Giving yourself bite-sized doses of accomplishment is a great way to fuel your momentum machine. Setting yourself up for success means being realistic with your expectations so you can achieve what you set out to. It helps absolutely no one if you set unreasonable expectations to accomplish these tasks.
It’s important to note that this is a system of triage. The catch is that this system is designed for marathons and not for start-to-finish sprints. As you work through and check off items from your priority groupings, you’ll repeat the process for the tasks that didn’t make the cut during our first round.
While you've implemented a sustainable way to maintain this emergency system, it does not aim to replace a project plan, project management tool, roadmap, or other methods for long-term goal accountability.
If you sprint the whole marathon, you won’t be able to jog tomorrow. And you need to jog tomorrow. Consistent chunks of jogging will help you cover vastly more ground over time than one marathon sprint every three months. I promise. James Clear outlines this pretty extensively in Atomic Habits.
I’m not advocating or prescribing; only offering resources for consideration. Not everything in life needs to be an optimized habit. It can be, I’m just underscoring that you can opt in or opt out to your own level of habit stacking.
A few thoughts to take with you, if you find them helpful:
GPS.
This GPS (Grace, Pace, Space) is best for navigating the moments when you feel like the collision is coming.
- Grace - give yourself a break. We do the best we can with what we have. Oh, and don't "should" on yourself if you can help it. Perfect is the enemy of good.
- Pace - adjust the dial to where it needs to be, realistically, in the moment; if that's the speed you got, let it rip. Some is better than none.
- Space - clear the clutter. Give yourself whatever room you need to succeed. Done is better than perfect.
PIPES.
- Pause & Identify
- Prioritize
- Eliminate
- Start
